What I has been doing.
Jan. 4th, 2007 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsidheFor Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Hannukah, and my birthday, I got 1) books, and 2) DVDs.
As far as DVDs go, I know that people love me. I now own The Goodies 4 disc box, The Monty Python Personal Best 3 double-sided disc box, Fawlty Towers in its entirety, The Life of Brian (to join Holy Grail and ...And Now For Something Completely Different in the collection) Blackadder and My Neighbor Totoro (which Abbi and Susi love, thanks![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
usuakari and tooticky).
That isn't including that we also went out and got Constantine (worthwhile, I think, in its own right, even if disappointing in relation to the original), Evolution and its sequel (come on, Kate Beckinsale in leather!), Hitchhikers Guide (I loved that the original Arthur was the recorded Magerathean message) and Batman Begins (I still haven't seen it, despite having heard nothing but good things about it, and the sequel in progress).
As far as books go, I had to buy my own presents, as I am weird enough that no-one can be expected to both predict which book I might be interested in (even if it is in a field that I am a known maven in, the book might be known crap), and what might already be in my library. I got a book on biblical philology called How the Bible Became a Book (which is fascinating in its insights into the history of the entire middle-eastern region from c1500BCE on to early Christian times, and the ways in which the various kingdoms of the Israelites propagandised and related with the other regimes of the region). I also got John Ralston Saul's latest The Collapse of Globalism, which is just as fascinating, in similar ways. There is an entire section which I intend to quote here later on, as it provides marvellous insight into why the French ghetto riots of the last year or two won't happen here.
Then there is one I got through Amazon on Custom and Belief in Pagan Germanic and Celtic Societies. Again, not everyone's cup of tea, yet I'm finding it fascinating. Not least because of the way it draws together the various skeins of foreign reportage (whether Tacitus, Caesar, or ibn Fadhlan ibn Rashid) with native documents (from the Mabinogion, to the Táin Bó Cuailgne, to the Lándsnámabók), and adds what few other works on the subject that I have seen do: adds times to developments. When did the Celts stop being head hunters? When did the Æsir stop being worshipped? How were the Æsir and Vanir worshipped every day? (You can't make a Blood-Raven every day, after all.)
Typically for me, I have been reading all three in parallel, along with the Fortean Times and APC magazines which arrived in the same period. I've also spent today reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves -- finally. I am glad that I've only borrowed that one. It's amusing, but not something that I'll feel the need to keep on my desk.
Next Monday, it's back to work. Ah well. It's not like the girls give me much time to read during the day anyway.
I have also been looking, desultarily, at the SGML parsing code I've been working on in Perl. I did make a discovery which should be in the docs, somewhere. When you use the threads module, and you're passing a lot of data between one thread and another, it would make sense to use the Thread::Queue module, provided for that very purpose, right? Bzzzt, try again. A Thread::Queue will only accept scalars. Plain vanilla string-or-number scalars. No objects. No pointers, in fact, of any kind. Strings, or nothing.
Grumble, mutter. At least it prodded me to sort out my code, clean it up a bit (OK, a lot), and only use one thread, and that to print a running status of how much work is left to do, while the main thread gets on with doing said work. Much more elegant than how I was trying to do it. (OK, there is some beauty in one thread tokenising a string, and passing the tokens off to another thread to be placed in their proper place in a tree, with a third thread watching the progress, but when you can't actually return the tree object you've spent so much time extracting, what's the fecking point, eh?
As far as DVDs go, I know that people love me. I now own The Goodies 4 disc box, The Monty Python Personal Best 3 double-sided disc box, Fawlty Towers in its entirety, The Life of Brian (to join Holy Grail and ...And Now For Something Completely Different in the collection) Blackadder and My Neighbor Totoro (which Abbi and Susi love, thanks
usuakari and tooticky).That isn't including that we also went out and got Constantine (worthwhile, I think, in its own right, even if disappointing in relation to the original), Evolution and its sequel (come on, Kate Beckinsale in leather!), Hitchhikers Guide (I loved that the original Arthur was the recorded Magerathean message) and Batman Begins (I still haven't seen it, despite having heard nothing but good things about it, and the sequel in progress).
As far as books go, I had to buy my own presents, as I am weird enough that no-one can be expected to both predict which book I might be interested in (even if it is in a field that I am a known maven in, the book might be known crap), and what might already be in my library. I got a book on biblical philology called How the Bible Became a Book (which is fascinating in its insights into the history of the entire middle-eastern region from c1500BCE on to early Christian times, and the ways in which the various kingdoms of the Israelites propagandised and related with the other regimes of the region). I also got John Ralston Saul's latest The Collapse of Globalism, which is just as fascinating, in similar ways. There is an entire section which I intend to quote here later on, as it provides marvellous insight into why the French ghetto riots of the last year or two won't happen here.
Then there is one I got through Amazon on Custom and Belief in Pagan Germanic and Celtic Societies. Again, not everyone's cup of tea, yet I'm finding it fascinating. Not least because of the way it draws together the various skeins of foreign reportage (whether Tacitus, Caesar, or ibn Fadhlan ibn Rashid) with native documents (from the Mabinogion, to the Táin Bó Cuailgne, to the Lándsnámabók), and adds what few other works on the subject that I have seen do: adds times to developments. When did the Celts stop being head hunters? When did the Æsir stop being worshipped? How were the Æsir and Vanir worshipped every day? (You can't make a Blood-Raven every day, after all.)
Typically for me, I have been reading all three in parallel, along with the Fortean Times and APC magazines which arrived in the same period. I've also spent today reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves -- finally. I am glad that I've only borrowed that one. It's amusing, but not something that I'll feel the need to keep on my desk.
Next Monday, it's back to work. Ah well. It's not like the girls give me much time to read during the day anyway.
I have also been looking, desultarily, at the SGML parsing code I've been working on in Perl. I did make a discovery which should be in the docs, somewhere. When you use the threads module, and you're passing a lot of data between one thread and another, it would make sense to use the Thread::Queue module, provided for that very purpose, right? Bzzzt, try again. A Thread::Queue will only accept scalars. Plain vanilla string-or-number scalars. No objects. No pointers, in fact, of any kind. Strings, or nothing.
Grumble, mutter. At least it prodded me to sort out my code, clean it up a bit (OK, a lot), and only use one thread, and that to print a running status of how much work is left to do, while the main thread gets on with doing said work. Much more elegant than how I was trying to do it. (OK, there is some beauty in one thread tokenising a string, and passing the tokens off to another thread to be placed in their proper place in a tree, with a third thread watching the progress, but when you can't actually return the tree object you've spent so much time extracting, what's the fecking point, eh?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-04 10:02 pm (UTC)It would have been an excellent film if they hadn't bothered with Katie Holmes.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 01:57 am (UTC)Evolution? I'm assuming you mean Underworld and it's sequel Underworld: Evolution. (See, I can be nearly as pedantic as you.) And yes, Kate Beckinsale in leather (or at least selected bits of her) is hard to go past. It's why
gormlessstrapping young werewolf and his co-worker than between him and Selene. ;)You could have just asked to borrow Batman Begins. I've had a copy for a while now. The casting was generally inspired, even for bit parts like Fleiss, but as
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 03:48 am (UTC)To be honest, I think it would have been a stronger movie without that character at all. But that could very easily be a response to her lack of ability (based upon her performance in that single movie) rather than the character herself.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 04:51 am (UTC)If you're gripe is specifically with Katie Holmes, rather than a combo of the actress and the character, then yeah I tend to agree. Although she fits in with the current stereotype of perky, vulnerable young legal women in US media reasonably well. (Give me Leo McKern any day though...)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-05 05:06 am (UTC)That's the problem. My view of the character is so intricately tied up with Holmes' portrayal of her that I simply can't separate out how much of it was Holmes, and how much of it was the character.
*shrug* Moot point, anyway.
Re: Leo: £112 (or a bit less) so will get you the complete series on DVD from Amazon UK. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 10:27 am (UTC)*embarrassed mumble* umm, yeah. Dat's der bunny.
And "it is" -> "it's"
"belonging to it" -> "its"
Sorry. I had to.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-06 06:08 pm (UTC)